The Negotiating Committee is providing this update to the AMFA Membership at Southwest Airlines. This report is the only official authorized written source of negotiating communications by the Committee.

We began our two-day session on Tuesday morning, March 4th. The Company began by presenting their “Status of Agreement” counter proposal. They also asked to table “Classifications” for now. We presented our “Severance Pay” and “Union Representation” counter proposals. We worked through a few concerns and tentatively agreed (TAed) to both those sections. We then discussed the status of the “Preamble,” “Purpose of Agreement," and “Savings Clause” sections, which we did not realize the Company considered as tabled after our last session. We explained to the Company that the language in those sections is similar to the language in the Aircraft Technician and Apprentice agreements and to reconsider their previous position. We then caucused as a Committee to discuss these sections until lunch.

Following lunch we remained in caucus and worked counter proposals for the “Grievance Procedure,” “Arbitration,” and “Status of Agreement” sections. When our committees got back together we presented another counter to the “Status of Agreement.” The Company took a short caucus and then returned with minor changes to our last proposals for the “Preamble,” “Purpose of Agreement,” and “Status of Agreement” sections. After a short discussion we were able to TA all three. At 3:00 pm, the Company had a Comprehensive Disability presentation scheduled, which included data specific to the Facilities Maintenance Technician group. The presentation was basically the same as the one presented in the Aircraft Maintenance Technician and Related negotiations.

On Wednesday, due to an unplanned event, we had some time to continue our work on counter proposals for the “Grievance Procedure” and “Arbitration” sections. The Company also asked us to look at some alternative language to our proposal on the “Saving Clause” section, which we were also able to work on. The Company joined us at 10:00 am and we presented the sections mentioned above, which concluded with a TA on the “Savings Clause” section. Including the six TA’d during this session, we have a total of nine sections TA’ed, in concept. We also began referring to them by article numbers, which is consistent with other AMFA Agreements on property. To date the nine TA’ed articles are: “Preamble,” “Purpose of Agreement” (Article 1), “Status of Agreement” (Article 3), “Training” (Article 7), “Profit Sharing” (Article 16), “Severance Pay” (Article 18), “Moving Expenses” (Article 19), “Union Representation” (Article 25) and “Savings Clause” (Article 27).

We concluded the session notifying the Company we were not interested in having their new Comprehensive Disability Program apply to this workgroup. Our next session is scheduled for March 25th and a half day on March 26th.